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The use of Latin in the medieval world is so fundamental a fact that it is commonly not remarked upon and rarely discussed in detail. Yet its continued use in Europe after the demise of the Roman Empire and the broad extent of that use are remarkable, not least because Latin was not a native language for any of its users. This introductory chapter sets out to demonstrate the vitality and importance of this Latin, with a particular focus on the contexts of its use and on Britain. It first sets out the chronological, geographical, and linguistic boundaries adopted for the volume (the Latin of Britain from the mid-6th century to the end of the 16th), and considers issues arising from them, especially from the inherently multilingual context for Medieval Latin in Britain. The use of Latin in Britain is discussed with regard to what it was used for and by whom, including questions of literacy and its use as an oral language. A brief discussion follows of previous work on Latin of the medieval period and of Britain in particular. The other chapters are discussed, highlighting the continuity with other Latins and adaptation to the circumstances of use.

This chapter discusses the rise of the vernaculars and changing role of Latin in medieval Europe. It presents the evidence for nuns and other religious women as poets in Latin. It also examines different varieties of religious life for medieval women, and the implications of these different lifestyles for access to Latin literacy. It discusses women and the exercise of authority in medieval Europe (notably by Norman royal ladies): early arguments for the Latin education of noblewomen. The chapter includes specific sections on surviving anonymous Latin verse in women's voices, rotuli (memorial rolls) as evidence for convent literacy, Baudri of Bourgeuil's circle of educated women, particularly Constantia, women Latinists in northern Europe, especially Hildegard of Bingen, the nuns of Helfta, the love-verses from Regensburg, and Willetrudis's Versus de Susanna: it is argued that this last may have been written at Wilton.

The present study discusses classes of words attested in Polish Medieval Latin which might be interpreted both as borrowings (or loan translations) from Old Polish and as products of regular Latin word formation. Starting from the general structural similarity between Polish and Latin as inflectional languages as well as from their phonetic similarity, it emphasizes the role of inflection in lexical transfers from Polish into Latin. The interaction between borrowing and word formation is, in turn, addressed in terms of parallel semantic niches occurring in Old Polish and Polish Medieval Latin. The analysis consists in verifying whether the niches encountered in Polish Medieval Latin are organized according to a lexico-semantic pattern attested in Latin of any period in its history. In addition, by making recourse to Štekauer’s onomasiological theory, the possible interaction between competition and collaboration, as manifested in new coinages in Polish Medieval Latin, is examined.

The possibility that quantitative clausulae were sought by authors of the Latin literature of the medieval West offers a new means of entering the debate over ‘continuity or discontinuity’ between late antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages. The principles and aims of calculating prose rhythm, whether quantitative or tonic, have been changed; but much has returned as well. The variation of prosodical structure between the body and the end of a period may well be due to other reasons than the search for rhythm, such as the general preference of a long word to a short one to close a sentence. If the presented preliminary results are confirmed in the future by larger samples, it may be possible to trace in this twelfth-century prose a tendency towards what was to become the system characteristic of the Italian schools of ars dictaminis, namely a division of functions between the cursus tardus, deputed to minor pauses, and the obligatory cursus uelox, used to conclude nearly every sentence.

This chapter examines the essential elements that produced a full scientific culture in Western Europe by comparing the constituent elements in the one culture in which it developed with other cultures that had the same constitutive elements but did not develop science. These are the control cases, which include India, Tibet, China, and the Byzantine Empire. The first civilization in the world to develop a full scientific culture was medieval Western Europe. It led directly to the scientific revolution—during which some changes to the details of the constituent elements took place—and continued on down to modern science. The essential elements of medieval science were introduced to Western Europe via Classical Arabic civilization. The chapter describes the appearance of science in Medieval Latin Europe and the decline of science in the medieval Islamic world.

This chapter is primarily concerned with Anglo-Latin prose: that is to say, Latin prose composed in Anglo-Saxon England between roughly 650 and 1050. It poses the question of the extent to which Anglo-Latin authors were aware of different stylistic registers, and how well they understood what diction was appropriate to either prose or verse. Using the example of Bede as a starting point, the chapter provides a list of those features of poetic diction that are found, in varying degrees, in the authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The seven criteria presented provide a crude measuring-stick against which to assess the poeticism of the principal authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The study of poeticism in Anglo-Latin prose, and in medieval Latin literature in general, is a subject that awaits exploration.

Revival of the liberal arts and classical studies at several times was responsible for multiple periods of influx of Greek and Latin loanwords in English. This chapter outlines the works that were influential on the external history of English in connection with the continental background to the events in the British Isles discussed in previous chapters. The main topics are Ecclesiastical Latin, the reforms of Alcuin and Medieval Latin, the Humanistic and Neolatin of the Renaissance, the effects of printing and other factors on standardization, latinate vocabulary in Shakespeare and other literary works, and the technical and scientific terminology in the post‐Renaissance period.

The 15th and 16th centuries are often depicted as the death throes of Latin in England, supplanted by ‘The Rise of English’. Arguing that more English did not necessarily mean less Latin, this chapter assesses the role of Latin in England from c.1400 to c.1540, and suggests that in terms of overall cultural history, use, and the accumulated inheritance from the past, this may have been when England was at its most Latinate of all. Considering the use of Latin as a spectrum of skills—reading, writing, speaking, and listening—and across a range of abilities, it offers a positive appreciation of late Medieval Latin as a vital force in a multilingual society.

This chapter considers the distribution and meaning of the 116 historic North British Sunnysides and 63 Greens given in the Sunnyside Gazetteer, and the distribution and structure of the Sunnyside of X and Greens of X construction. Sixteenth-century Medieval Latin Sunnysides are exerpted from the Records of the Sheriff Court of Aberdeenshire and the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland AD 1620-1633. The distribution when plotted forms three main groups: the first is the north-east of Scotland bounded by the Grampians, the second is the Central Lowlands, and the third is the border area of the Eastern Lowlands of Scotland and North-Eastern England divided by the Cheviots. The practice of ‘vesying the sunny side’ as a means of land-tenure division is described in North British and Nordic cultures. It is posited that the Sunnyside of X and Greens of X construction is Old Norse.

Vivienne Law acquired a mastery of the field of late antique and early Medieval Latin grammar, her first task was to familiarise herself with the early medieval manuscripts in which grammatical texts were transmitted. This task necessitated constant travel to British and continental libraries in order to provide herself with transcriptions of grammatical texts; it also necessitated the acquisition of a huge collection of microfilms of grammatical manuscripts. Her work on these manuscripts soon revealed a vast and uncharted sea of unedited and unstudied grammatical texts, for the most part anonymous. A major component of her life's work was the attempt to chart this sea. Her earliest publications reveal a profound experience of grammatical manuscripts and a refusal simply to reiterate the opinions of earlier scholars. All these publications report new discoveries, such as previously unknown Old English glosses to the Ars grammatica of Tatwine, an early 8th-century Anglo-Saxon grammarian; or unsuspected aspects of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and continental learning as revealed in the transmission of the grammars of Boniface and Tatwine; or the true nature of the jumbled and misunderstood grammar attributed to the early Irish grammarian Malsachanus.

Accounts of institutions and private individuals between the Norman Conquest and about 1500 were routinely written in a non-random mixture of Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. If the base language was Medieval Latin, then only nouns, stems of verbs, and certain semantic fields such as weights and measures could appear in English or French, with all the grammatical material in Latin and English and Anglo-Norman nouns, verbs, and adjectives Latinised by adding a suffix, or an abbreviation sign representing a suffix. If the base language was Anglo-Norman, then only the same restricted semantic fields and nouns and stems of verbs could appear in English. This situation changed over time, but was essentially stable for almost five hundred years. The chapter asks why, if English words could easily be assimilated into a Latin or French matrix by means of suffixes or abbreviations representing suffixes, were all English words not assimilated? Why did letter graphies such as <wr->, <-ck>, <-ght> persist in mixed-language business writing? One effect is to make the text-type of business writing very unlike any other genre—half a glance is all it takes to recognise a mixed-language business document and that may have been an advantage.

The terminology of official documents in England changed with the Norman Conquest, and this chapter focuses on the words used for ealdorman, earl, count, thegn, baron, sheriff, reeve, and shire during the 11th and early-12th centuries. Unofficial texts sometimes preferred not to use the official terms but drew on a more classical vocabulary, investing words with the specific connotations of the underlying terms for which they were substitutes. Words that carry such specific meanings are identified by using unofficial Medieval Latin translations of official documents in Old English, law tracts that translate or reflect Old English terms, and translations or reworkings of narrative sources in both languages. Examples of the unofficial vocabulary are reviewed, and how far both the DMLBS and modern editions of texts have recognised their use is appraised. Such lexical substitution has not been treated as a semantic category by dictionaries, but it must be recognised to arrive at a true contextual understanding of words used in primary sources. The examples shed light on categories of office and rank across this period, and the argument will lead to much rethinking of how passages in the sources are understood. The linguistic implications extend beyond the words studied.

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 12 is a predominantly Welsh-language miscellany that also contains texts in Middle English and Latin. On folio 79v is the inscription ‘Llyfr Hugh Evans yw hwn Anno 1583’, that is ‘This is Hugh Evans’s book, in the year 1583’. As a miscellany the manuscript is of interest as much for what it suggests about the process of compilation as for its contents, for while it is in one sense of the late 16th century, a number of significant parts are gatherings from medieval manuscripts, both Welsh and English. The evidence of the process of compilation that the manuscript yields has much to suggest about the interplay between Welsh-language and English-language culture over a broad historical perspective, and this raises questions about the linguistic and cultural history of medieval and early modern Wales.

A distinctive feature of the English royal courts created in the last quarter of the 12th century was that they kept a full record of their business in Latin and the clerks who did this developed a distinctive vocabulary to translate the Anglo-Norman French they heard in court. This paper looks at some of that Medieval Latin lexicography for the legal profession: the development of specific terms for litigants and their representatives and judges; for the writs for initiating litigation and to secure the appearance of opponents; for the plaintiff’s claim or complaint and the defendant’s defence; for the modes of proof and judgement. The chapter concludes with a more detailed examination of the specific terminology of a single action (of replevin) which allowed someone whose property had been taken in distraint to challenge the justice of an unjust distraint.

Much attention has been paid to the Gregorius-tradition in Germany. The medieval German poem by Hartmann von Aue, based on the early French version, is important as a major work of literature, and many further texts were based upon it. Those in prose are treated in the next chapter. This chapter analyses Hartmann’s work, his use of paradox and of complex cumulative imagery, and his presentation of a philosophy of sin and grace deriving partly from Gregory the Great, and stressing again the dangers of despairing in God. Two medieval Latin poems also derive from Hartmann, the more theological full version by Arnold of Lübeck and a brief anonymous poem in hexameters from south Germany designed for school rhetoric lessons.

Chapter 3 turns to Dares’ place in complex medieval debates over the relative merits of history and fiction. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it begins by discussing readings of the Destruction of Troy as moral exemplum and then examines how Dares sheds new light on an oft-discussed topic in the medieval reception of antiquity: i.e., allegory. From allegory and exemplarity it moves to poetry, exploring how sources including the Old French Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, the Iliad of Joseph of Exeter, and the Troilus of Albert von Stade appropriated the supposed truth of the first pagan historian and then translated it into verse. In particular, it reconstructs how medieval poets who claimed to follow Dares engaged in both imitation of—and polemic against—ancient poets like Virgil. This chapter closes with considerations of Dares’ role in later medieval literature, including his use by figures like Guido delle Colonne, Petrarch, and Chaucer.